Pilates Exercise: The Lat Pull

We’re going to be doing a lat pull. You’ll want to skip this exercise if you are in acute pain or if you experience numbing and tingling in your arms or upper back while you’re doing the exercise.

Go ahead and wrap the Thera-Band around your doorknob. There’s options for more resistance. One is to back up a little bit from the doorway. The next is to wrap the hands within the Thera-Band which is our preference because it kind of feels like the straps on the reformer.

We stand with our feet hip width apart making sure we’re not hyper extending in the knees. Feeling the connection of the abdominals. Having nice open shoulders, but without flaring through the ribs.

We’re going to lose our upper abs if we flare through the ribs like, so we want to make sure that we’re sort of corseting our ribs together. At the same time, we want to keep the thoracic open. We want to think of having nice open shoulders without flaring, and of course reaching through the crown of the head.

Amanda’s going to go into the lat pull. She’s going to exhale. She’s going to press her arms down and back, keeping the arms straight, and keeping the elbows soft. We also want to make sure that we don’t hyperextend through the elbows. She’s exhaling as she presses back, and she’s inhaling as she comes in. She’s got the lats working, right? The sides of the back. She also is going to be feeling her triceps working, the backs of the arms, and she’s going to be feeling the backs of the shoulders working too.

Here is this hyperextension of the elbow, so we want to be careful of that. Go ahead and go back into the . When you hyperextend you can’t access the muscles, you’re just bracing out the joints.